NASA made some gorgeous print-quality exoplanet travel posters

NASA’s Kepler space telescope is up and running again, albeit at diminished capacity. Still, there are nearly 2,000 known confirmed exoplanets so far, and that’s surely just scratching the surface. A considerably smaller fraction of these worlds are seen as potentially Earth-like and NASA has created some awesome retro travel posters for three of these planets.

The exoplanet travel series consists of three posters available for download in high-resolution print quality. Each poster has a cool fictionalized rendering of people visiting the planet and a slogan to draw you in and make you wish you could start planning a trip. At the bottom is some real information about the planet, including its resemblance to Earth. Let’s take a look at each one, and don’t forget to grab the full resolution images from the NASA page. The images below are scaled down.

The Kepler-186f poster bears the slogan, “Where the Grass is Always Redder on the Other Side.” This comes from the very different star around which this planet orbits. It’s much cooler and redder than the sun, so if plants do exist there, they might have a very different color palette than we’re used to here. Kepler-186f is about 500 light years away in the habitable zone of Kepler-186, and its only a little larger than Earth.

HD 40307g is only 42 light years away and is what’s known as a super-Earth. Unlike the other planets depicted in the posters, this one was discovered using the the radial velocity method, using the European Southern Observatory’s HARPS apparatus. At eight times the mass of Earth, gravity will be a real killer for any human visitors, but life could exist there. However, it may also be a very small gas giant.

The last of the three destinations suggested by the fictional Exoplanet Travel Bureau is Kepler-16b, which the poster compares to Tatooine. It reads, “Relax on Kepler-16b – Where your shadow always has company.” That’s because it has two very large suns (a binary system), like Tatooine. NASA is taking some liberties with this one as it has a mass similar to Saturn. That means up to 30 times Earth’s mass. Oh well, the sunsets would still look nice.

NASA offers all three images in JPEG or TIFF formats. The JPEGs are around 16-20MB. The TIFF files are upward of 30MB.